Subscribe To

Sunday, 9 October 2016

The Saker on Russia's options against an American attack

An
excellent article from the Saker which lays out Russia's numerical
weakness vis-a-vis NATO. Russia has to rely on quality not quantity
and on "horizontal" responses that make it politically
unpalatable for the Americans.

The
tensions between Russia and the USA have reached an unprecedented
level. I fully agree with the participants of this
CrossTalk show –
the situation is even worse and more dangerous than during the Cuban
Missile Crisis. Both sides are now going
to the so-called “Plan B” which,
simply put, stand for, at best, no negotiations and, at worst, a war
between Russia and the USA.

The
key thing to understand in the Russian stance in this, and other,
recent conflicts with the USA is that Russia
is still much weaker than the USA and
that she therefore does not want war. That does not, however, mean
that she is not actively preparing for war. In fact, she
very much and actively does.
All this means is that should a conflict occur, Russia you try, as
best can be, to keep it as limited as possible.

In
theory, these are, very roughly, the possible levels of
confrontation:

1)
A military standoff à
laBerlin
in 1961.
One could argue that this is what is already taking place right now,
albeit in a more long-distance and less visible way.

2)
A single military incident, such as what happened recently when
Turkey shot down a Russian SU-24 and Russia chose not to retaliate.

4)
A conflict limited to the Syrian theater of war (say like the war
between the UK and Argentina over the Malvinas Islands)

5)
A regional or global military confrontation between the USA and
Russia

6)
A full scale thermonuclear war between the USA and Russia

During
my years as a student of military strategy I have participated in
many exercises on escalation and de-escalation and I can attest that
while it is very easy to come up with escalatory scenarios, I have
yet to see a credible scenario for de-escalation. What is possible,
however, is the so-called “horizontal escalation” or
“asymmetrical escalation” in which one side choses not to up the
ante or directly escalate, but instead choses a different target for
retaliation, not necessarily a more valuable one, just a different
one on the same level of conceptual importance (in the USA Joshua
M. Epstein and Spencer
D. Bakich did
most of the groundbreaking work on this topic).

The
main reason why we can expect the Kremlin to try to find asymmetrical
options to respond to a US attack is that in the Syrian context
Russia is hopelessly outgunned by the US/NATO, at least in
quantitative terms. The logical solutions for the Russians is to use
their qualitative advantage or to seek “horizontal targets” as
possible retaliatory options. This week, something very interesting
and highly uncharacteristic happened: Major General Igor Konashenkov,
the Chief of the Directorate of Media service and Information of the
Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, openly mentioned one
such option. Here is what he said:

“As
for Kirby’s threats about possible Russian aircraft losses and the
sending of Russian servicemen back to Russia in body bags, I would
say that we know exactly where and how many “unofficial
specialists” operate in Syria and in the Aleppo province and we
know that they are involved in the operational planning and that they
supervise the operations of the militants. Of course, one can
continue to insist that they are unsuccessfully involved in trying to
separate the al-Nusra terrorists from the “opposition” forces.
But if somebody tries to implement these threats, it is by no means
certain that these militants will have to time to get the hell out of
there.”

Nice,
no? Konashenkov appears to be threatening the “militants” but he
is sure to mention that there are plenty of “unofficial
specialists” amongst these militants and that Russia knows exactly
where they are and how many of them there are.

Of course, officially,
Obama has declared that there are a few hundred such US special
advisors in Syria. A well-informed Russian source suggests that there
are up to 5,000 foreign ‘advisors’ to the Takfiris including
about 4,000 Americans. I suppose that the truth is somewhere between
these two figures.

So
the Russian threat is simple: you attack us and we will attack US
forces in Syria. Of course, Russia will vehemently deny targeting US
servicemen and insist that the strike was only against terrorists,
but both sides understand what is happening here. Interestingly, just
last week the Iranian Fars news agency reported that such a Russian
attack had already happened:

“The
Russian warships fired three Caliber missiles at the foreign
officers’ coordination operations room in Dar Ezza region in the
Western part of Aleppo near Sam’an mountain, killing 30 Israeli and
western officers,” the Arabic-language service of
Russia’s Sputnik news
agency quoted battlefield source in Aleppo as saying on Wednesday.
The operations room was located in the Western part of Aleppo
province in the middle of sky-high Sam’an mountain and old caves.
The region is deep into a chain of mountains. Several US, Turkish,
Saudi, Qatari and British officers were also killed along with the
Israeli officers. The foreign officers who were killed in the Aleppo
operations room were directing the terrorists’ attacks in Aleppo
and Idlib.”

Whether
this really happened or whether the Russians are leaking such stories
to indicate that this could happen, the fact remains that US forces
in Syria could become an obvious target for Russian retaliation,
whether by cruise missile, gravity bombs or direct action operation
by Russian special forces. The US also has several covert military
installations in Syria, including at least one airfield with V-22
Osprey multi-mission tiltrotor aircraft.

Another
interesting recent development has been the Fox News report that
Russians are deploying S-300V (aka “SA-23 Gladiator anti-missile
and anti-aircraft system”) in Syria. Check out this
excellent article for
a detailed discussion of the capabilities of this missile system. I
will summarize it by saying that the S-300V can engage ballistic
missiles, cruise missiles, very low RCS (“stealth”) aircraft and
AWACS aircraft. This is an Army/Army Corps -level air defense system,
well capable of defending most of the Syrian airspace, but also reach
well into Turkey, Cyprus, the eastern Mediterranean and Lebanon. The
powerful radars of this system could not only detect and engage US
aircraft (including “stealth”) at a long distance, but they could
also provide a tremendous help for the few Russian air superiority
fighters by giving them a clear pictures of the skies and enemy
aircraft by using encrypted datalinks. Finally, US air doctrine is
extremely dependent on the use of AWACS aircraft to guide and support
US fighters. The S-300V will force US/NATO AWACS to operate at a most
uncomfortable distance. Between the longer-range radars of the
Russian Sukhois, the radars on the Russian cruisers off the Syrian
coast, and the S-300 and S-300V radars on the ground, the Russians
will have a much better situational awareness than their US
counterparts.

It
appears that the Russians are trying hard to compensate for their
numerical inferiority by deploying high-end systems for which the US
has no real equivalent or good counter-measures.

There
are basically two options of deterrence: denial, when you prevent
your enemy from hitting his targets and retaliation, when you make
the costs of an enemy attack unacceptably high for him. The Russians
appear to be pursuing both tracks at the same time. We can thus
summarize the Russian approach as such

1)
Delay a confrontation as long as possible (buy time)

2)
Try to keep any confrontation at the lowest possible escalatory level

3)
If possible, reply with asymmetrical/horizontal escalations

4)
Rather then “prevail” against the US/NATO – make the costs of
an attack too high

5)
Try to put pressure on US “allies” in order to create tensions
inside the Empire

6)
Try to paralyze the US on a political level by making the political
costs of an attack too high

7)
Try to gradually create the conditions on the ground (Aleppo) to make
a US attack futile

To
those raised on Hollywood movies and who still watch TV, this kind of
strategy will elicit only frustration and condemnation. There are
millions of armchair strategists who are sure that they could do a
much better job than Putin in countering the US Empire. These folks
have now been telling us for *years* that Putin “sold out” the
Syrians (and the Novorussians) and that the Russians ought to do X, Y
and Z to defeat the AngloZionist Empire. The good news is that none
of these armchair strategists sit in the Kremlin and that the
Russians have stuck to their strategy over the past years, one day at
a time, even when criticized by those who want quick and “easy”
solutions. But the main good news is that the Russian strategy is
working. Not only is the Nazi-occupied Ukraine quite literally
falling apart, but the US has basically run out of options in Syria
(see this
excellent analysis by
my friend Alexander Mercouris in the Duran).

The
only remaining logical steps left for the US in Syria is to accept
Russia’s terms or leave. The problem is that I am not at all
convinced that the Neocons, who run the White House, Congress and the
US corporate media, are “rational” at all. This is why the
Russians employed so many delaying tactics and why they have acted
with such utmost caution: they are dealing with professional
incompetent ideologues who simply do not play by the unwritten but
clear rules of civilized international relations. This is what makes
the current crisis so much worse than even the Cuban Missile Crisis:
one superpower has clearly gone insane.

Are
the Americans crazy enough to risk WWIII over Aleppo?

Maybe,
maybe not. But what if we rephrase that question and ask

Are
the Americans crazy enough to risk WWIII to maintain their status as
the “world’s indispensable nation”, the “leader of the free
world”, the “city on the hill” and all the rest of this
imperialistic nonsense?

Here
I would submit that yes, they potentially are.

After
all, the Neocons are correct when they sense that if Russia gets away
with openly defying and defeating the USA in Syria, nobody will take
the AngloZionists very seriously any more.

How
do you think the Neocons think when they see the President of the
Philippines publicly calling Obama a “son
of a whore”
and then tells the EU to go and “f*ck
itself”?

Of
course, the Neocons can still find some solace in the abject
subservience of the European political elites, but still – they
know that the writing is on the wall and that their Empire is rapidly
crumbling, not only in Syria, the Ukraine or Asia, but even inside
the US. The biggest danger here is that the Neocons might try to
rally the nation around the flag, either by staging yet another false
flag or by triggering a real international crisis.

At
this point in time all we can do is wait and hope that there is
enough resistance inside the US government to prevent a US attack on
Syria before the next Administration comes in. And while I am no
supporter of Trump, I would agree that Hillary and her evil cabal of
russophobic Neocons is so bad that Trump does give me some hope, at
least in comparison to Hillary.

So
if Trump wins, then Russia’s strategy will be basically justified.
Once Trump is on the White House, there is at least the possibility
of a comprehensive redefinition of US-Russian relations which would,
of course, begin with a de-escalation in Syria: while Obama/Hillary
categorically refuse to get rid of Daesh (by that I mean al-Nusra,
al-Qaeda, and all their various denominations), Trump appears to be
determined to seriously fight them, even if that means that Assad
stays in power. There is most definitely a basis for dialog here. If
Hillary comes in, then the Russians will have to make an absolutely
crucial call: how important is Syria in the context of their goal to
re-sovereignize Russia and to bring down the AngloZionist Empire?
Another way of formulating the same question is “would Russia
prefer a confrontation with the Empire in Syria or in the Ukraine?”.

One
way to gauge the mood in Russia is to look at the language of a
recent law proposed by President Putin and adopted by the Duma which
dealt with the issue of the Russia-US
Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement (PMDA) which,
yet again, saw the US yet again fail to deliver on their obligations
and which Russia has now suspended. What is interesting, is the
language chosen by the Russians to list
the conditions under
which they would resume their participation in this agreement and,
basically, agree to resume any kind of arms negotiations:

A
reduction of military infrastructure and the number of the US troops
stationed on the territory of NATO member states that joined the
alliance after September 1, 2000, to the levels at which they were
when the original agreement first entered into force.

The
abandonment of the hostile policy of the US towards Russia, which
should be carried out with the abolition of the Magnitsky Act of
2012 and the conditions of the Ukraine Freedom Support Act of 2014,
which were directed against Russia.

The
abolition of all sanctions imposed by the US on certain subjects of
the Russian Federation, Russian individuals and legal entities.

The
compensation for all the damage suffered by Russia as a result of
the imposition of sanctions .

The
US is also required to submit a clear plan for irreversible
plutonium disposition covered by the PMDA .

Now
the Russians are not delusional. They know full well that the USA
will never accept such terms. So what is this really all about? It is
a diplomatic but unambiguous way to tell the USA the exact same thing
which Philippine President Duterte (and Victoria Nuland) told the EU.